The present invention relates to an image processing system having the function of producing a printout from a read image.
A copying machine, a facsimile machine and the like are known as typical examples of an apparatus having such a function. This kind of apparatus has been generally arranged to produce a printout directly from a read image.
In the case of such an arrangement, most operators can not get to know whether reading of images has succeed or not until they actually view printouts.
If it is desired to add particular data (e.g., a character string) to a read image for the purpose of an easy understanding or utilization of the information carried by the image, there is no choice but to process the printout of the image and operators are compelled to do extremely time-consuming work. For example, it may be necessary to add the particular information (e.g.,a message) to the printout of an original image without altering the original image. In this case, however, an operator needs to produce a copy of the original image, manually write the desired information or the like on the copy to prepare a new original, and again produce a copy therefrom.
A number of other problems are pointed out. For example, in color image communication systems (including facsimiles for monochrome image communications), it is impossible to transmit or receive an image while monitoring it. As a result, on the transmission side, it is impossible to easily and quickly check whether an image to be transmitted has been correctly read.
On the reception side, since it is impossible to determine whether a received image contains errors or defects until the image is actually printed out, the failure of image reception cannot be promptly detected.
Conventional communication systems of this kind has further problems. For example, the size of an image which is to be outputted at a destination system cannot be specified on the transmission side. Similarly, a received image cannot be printed out on an arbitrarily enlarged or reduced scale on the reception side.
In addition, since image information generally contains a huge amount of information, it takes a long time to alter the size or color tone of an image represented by readout image data by means of a microprocessor which controls the apparatus.